that he had
an empire before him. At that time the youngsters all envied him. Burr
had not been talking twenty minutes with the commander before he asked
him to send for Lieutenant Nolan. Then after a little talk he asked
Nolan if he could show him something of the great river and the plans
for the new post. He asked Nolan to take him out in his skiff to show
him a canebrake or a cotton-wood tree, as he said,--really to seduce
him; and by the time the sail was over, Nolan was enlisted body and
soul. From that time, though he did not yet know it, he lived as A MAN
WITHOUT A COUNTRY.

What Burr meant to do I know no more than you, dear reader. It is none
of our business just now. Only, when the grand catastrophe came, and
Jefferson and the House of Virginia of that day undertook to break on
the wheel all the possible Clarences of the then House of York, by the
great treason trial at Richmond, some of the lesser fry in that distant
Mississippi Valley, which was farther from us than Puget's Sound is
to-day, in